would you rather have a less lovely library that was open more? I would.

Posted on by jessamyn
Let’s just say it: the more money you spend building your Big Beautiful Library, the less you have to pay for staffing, and open hours.

When Seattle voters agreed overwhelmingly in 1998 to foot the $196.4 million bill for new and improved libraries all around town, I’m pretty sure they didn’t expect they’d have fewer hours a week to enjoy the fruits of their investment. But that’s exactly what has happened…. When voters approved [the downtown library], the library was open 70 hours a week…. Now, the downtown library is open 58 hours a week. [lisnews]

go read Cites & Insights

Posted on by jessamyn
Walt Crawford’s lates Cites & Insights is out and has a fascinating several page discussion of “backchannel communication” going on at conferences, speaker panels, etc. Based on one blog posting and comments and expanded from there, Crawford discusses the recent [in our sphere anyhow] trend of laptop-enabled audience members not only being online during a speaker but communicating via chat or IRC with other attendees, comparing notes and discussing the talk in progress in a more formalized way. This was built into BloggerConII, you can read the transcripts from the librarianesque session if you’d like. I definitely do this during Council meetings sometimes, and yet when there’s a speaker at a conference, I often take special care to be at least one person in the audience who is paying attention, nodding and smiling at the right places, “getting it.” I will always remember the guy from RUSA who did this for me during a difficult right-after-lunch talk in an overhot conference room with bad acoustics when I was struggling to hold people’s attention; it was a kindness

you know what I think about this…

Posted on by jessamyn
The more documents are classified by our own government, the less The People have access to the information they need in order to be part of a functioning democracy. No wonder Bush & Co. want to replace the National Archivist with one of their own.

The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), a division of the National Archives, has released its report for fiscal year 2003, and it confirms what we’ve suspected: The government is classifying information at a staggering, sharply increasing rate. During the year, 14,228,020 documents were classified. This is an increase of 25% over last year.